I have to say some things: at least some of them could speak and
understand italian, althought it was proved that noone was
proficient either in metric or FFU, and i was trying to verify it.
I usaully speak always in italian when at home, i spoke english just
as a courtesy when i discovered that less than half of them was
understanding me in italian.
I was also tempted to tell them, when they said that even the old
foot was not a suitable units, that the walk was about 19/17 of a
survey mile (since people know that US people prefer fractions to
... possibly telling them that the survey mile is a genuine american
product and BUT it is NOT the same lenght of the "normal" mile ! I
would have been even more honest since this is much closer to
1800 m than the 6kft)
I wonder how the look would have been ....
On 2 Jun 2001, at 18:09, kilopascal wrote:
> Molto Buono except for one thing. When asked "..tell me in an another
> unit", I would have converted it to millimetres. If they insisted on an
> English unit, I would ask back, "What is an English unit?" Everytime a
> stranger comes to your town and you answer them in English units instead of
> acting ignorant, then what motivation is there for them to learn metric and
> promote conversion at home?
> If Americans feel that not only have you went to the effort to learn English
> so they don't have to learn other languages, now they will feel they don't
> have to learn metric because Europeans and others know FFU just as well.
> Even though this group didn't know FFU either, others might. The next time
> answer them only in metric and let them figure it out.
Leonardo Boselli
nucleo informatico e telematico
Dipartimento Ingegneria Civile
Universita` di Firenze
V. S. Marta 3 - I-50139 Firenze
tel +39()0554796431 fax +39()055495333
http://www.dicea.unifi.it/~leo
